Critical Essays On Edward Albee

This volume contains 39 essays and reviews, including several translated from German for the first time, that demonstrate the plenitude of Albee critism. The reviews cover The Zoo Story, Tiny Alice, The Death of Bessie Smith, The American Dream Counting the Ways, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Seascape, and A Delicate Balance. The volume also contains an interview with Albee, and an annotated bibliography of other interviews. Contributors include John Gassner, Clive Barns, Anne Paobicci, and John Kenneth Galbraith. ISBN 0-8161-8875-0: $35.00.

Essays to help you understand and appreciate the works of Edward Albee.

The landmark Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism, first published in the 1980s, is one of the most impressive collections of literary criticism ever produced. It is now available in digital format for the first time. This volume of the series provides excerpts and full-length critical essays on the playwright Edward Albee.

This work covers the canon of playwright Edward Albee, perhaps best known as the author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Comprehensive entries detail the plays and major characters. Other features include biographical information and insights into Albee's artistic beliefs, his understanding of the playwright's responsibility, the importance of music in drama, and the technical craft of writing plays.

America's most important living playwright, Edward Albee, has been rocking our country's moral, political and artistic complacency for more than 50 years. Beginning with his debut play, The Zoo Story (1958), and on to his barrier breaking works of the 1960s, most notably The American Dream (1960), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1963), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance (1966), Albee's provocative, unsparing indictment of the American way of life earned him early distinction as the dramatist of his generation. His acclaim was enhanced even further in the decades that followed with prize-winning dramas such as Seascape and Three Tall Women, as well as recent works like The Play About the Baby and Who is Sylvia? Albee has brought the same critical force to his non-theatrical prose. Stretching My Mind collects for the first time ever the author's writings on theater, literature, and the political and cultural battlegrounds that have defined his career. Many of the selections were drawn from Albee's private papers, and almost all previously published material—dating from 1960 to the present—has never been reprinted. Topics include Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Sam Shepherd, as well as autobiographical writings about Albee's life, work, and worldview.

This collection includes a wide-ranging and candid interview conducted by the editors, touching on such topics as the role of art as an active, shaping force in society; the relationship between art and political institutions; dramatic production and theory; the art of adaptation; and Albee's methods and purposes as a playwright and director. The essays exemplify dramatic, literary, linguistic and psychological approaches to Albee's work and range from detailed interpretations of individual plays to broad overviews. They discuss Albee's admitted concern with the problem of "knowing" and his frequent use of abstraction and allegory as a means of exploring this theme in his work. Other topics covered are: Albee's use of elements of Pirandellian drama, the vaudevillian form of Counting the Ways, ritual and initiation in The Zoo Story and a psychological reading of Seascape. ISBN 0-8156-8106-2 : $18.00 ; ISBN 0-8156-8107-0 (pbk.) : $10.00.

The landmark Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism, first published in the 1980s, is one of the most impressive collections of literary criticism ever produced. It is now available in digital format for the first time. This volume of the series provides excerpts and full-length critical essays on the poet and memoirist Maya Angelou.

August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.